Then by good luck W. B. Yeats, liking my first book of verse, asked me to come and see him. I owe more to him than to any man living, and my intense admiration for his work was reinforced by my intense admiration for himself.

Real people are places to me as much as persons: I want to see them, as I want to see the places I am fond of, in all weathers and at all times of the year.

People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do.

I broke down while at Oxford, was rejected by a record number of medical tribunals during the War, and finally got permission to leave Oxford and do civilian work till the War ended.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.